Archive for May, 2010
May 13th, 2010 | 
Author: Many people disagree with this strategy, but I’ve found there are times when it’s profitable and times when it’s downright ugly. Knowing when to use this strategy is essential to make it successful and profitable.
Before discussing the best time to go all-in, let me discuss one of the worst strategies I’ve seen: going all-in pre-flop during the early stages of a tournament. Many people do this in hopes of doubling-up, but the problem with this strategy is that the read is simple. When you commit all of your chips to the pot everyone knows you have a decent hand. Players frequently do this with a pair of jacks during the early rounds, which usually results in only getting calls from the hands that are better than theirs pre-flop – queens, kings or aces.
That being said, I love going all-in when the opportunity presents itself. What separates a great tournament player from a good one is that he knows when the best time to go all-in is. Here are the guidelines I use to determine if I should all-in with a hand.
Late Rounds (Tight Image)
If you’ve played very tight throughout the game your opponents have probably realized that you’re only playing the good hands. You can use this against them by going all-in to steal the blinds. If you’re on the button and everyone has folded to you, don’t be afraid to push in A-x suited or any pair all-in against decent players. Always remember that it is much harder to call an all-in than to bet all-in.
Against Highly Skilled Players
The all-in strategy is great for players who know they’re out-gunned. When you’re up against highly skilled tournament players who can outplay you on the flop, going all-in before the flop can be a helpful move. Although this strategy can backfire on you, it can be profitable when done in a certain way.
A player once went all-in on me repeatedly during the late stages of a tournament. In chat, I asked him why he would want to risk all of his chips each and every time. His response was that he knew I was the more skilled player and would outplay him on the flop. By going all-in, he significantly cut down how many times I would’ve called and taken him to the flop because I would’ve been forced to risk all of my chips on marginal hands.
The Bubble
Although this also qualifies as late rounds, the situation is a little different. During multi-table tournaments, players tend to tighten their game considerably as they get closer to the money. This is when I love to build my chip stack by going all-in. I’ve won many big tournaments by raising tight players’ blinds during this stage of the tournament.
If you’re going to become a successful tournament player, you can’t be afraid to put your opponents’ chips to the test. The next time someone raises, you can say “I’m all-in” knowing you are in the proper situation to do so.
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This is part one of a four-part series outlining everything the average poker player needs to go from sit-and-go noob to sit-and-go shark. Part one will focus on low-blind play.
One type of poker that has really gained popularity online is the single-table tournament (STT) – commonly known as a “sit-and-go.”
Online sites have these running continuously. A new one starts as soon as it has enough players registered, so there’s never any shortage of action.
Sit-and-go play is a completely different monster than cash-game play. It is more similar to multi-table tournaments inasmuch as the amount of chips you have is finite. There are no re-buys and once your chips are gone you are gone. So you need to protect the chips you’re given at the start.
In the course of this multi-part article I will take you from being a sit-and-go noob to a sit-and-go shark.
The Basics
When the blinds are low you should employ a very conservative strategy. There’s no need to get overinvolved and risk tons of chips when the blinds are low.
If you have any chores to do around the house, than feel free to start up a sit-and-go or six and then go sweep the kitchen, vacuum the stairs and put your pot roast in. By the time you get back you should be ready to play.
Well obviously that is a little extreme, but it’s a more advisable course of action than getting all aggressive early.
Avoiding Confrontation Early
In the early stages of a sit-and-go you’d like to avoid large-scale confrontations. There’s no need to run up large bluffs or overplay marginal hands. There will be plenty of time for being ultra-aggressive later, so don’t worry.
What we’re trying to do is stay out of the action early. While I advise you to play very tight, you should still be playing strong hands aggressively. If you have a premium hand, by all means bring it in for a raise. I would never advocate anything different.
What I am saying is there’s no reason to try to exploit small edges early. For example:
Effective stacks $1,500. You have 9♠ 9♣ in the big blind. The blinds are $20/$40. There are 4 limpers to you.
In a cash game, this is a very easy raise. In a sit-and-go I would argue this is a check. If you wish to raise this hand you will have to make it at least 5 or 6x the BB since you will be out of position for the rest of the hand and there are four limpers in front of you.
For the sake of the example, you raise the pot to $240. The first two limpers fold and both the cut-off and the button call. The flop comes Q♥ 4♠ 2♣.
This flop is fairly decent for your hand. Only one overcard and you took the lead pre-flop so you will have to continuation bet this flop.
You bet 2/3 the pot or about $500. The cut-off folds and the button calls.
Now look at the spot you’re in. You’ve just put half of your stack into the pot. What are you going to do on the turn? The pot is now $1,800. If you fire again on the turn it will be for all your chips. How much can you like your hand?
The answer is probably not that much. Although checking and folding is also a pretty bad move, as you have half of your stack in the pot. This is why I advocate the check pre-flop while the blinds are low. It allows you to avoid a sticky situation like this one.
There are lots of situations like this. With speculative hands that are most likely to be good now but are not a huge favorite there’s no need to balloon a pot to exploit some small edge you may or may not have.
The amount of chips you’ll have to put into play to find out if you do have that edge is far too many to risk when your stack is finite. Rather than trying to push your small edges now it’s better to conserve your chips for the higher blind levels.
Regardless of the overall structure of a poker tournament or the style you play, you’ll be forced to take some coin flips on your path to the title.
With pressure from the rising blinds and players fighting for a finite number of chips, it’s not possible – or rather it’s completely improbable – you’ll make it through any poker tournament without ever being in a coin-flip situation.
So how can you make the most of it?
You Have to Flip … But You Don’t Want To
For clarity: Naturally, we’re not talking about the actual act of flipping a coin here (although many poker players have won and lost large amounts of money doing just that).
The poker equivalent of the coin flip is getting it all in against one opponent with your probability of winning approximately 50%.
Classic examples: A-K vs. JJ; A-T vs. K-Q.
Anytime you flip, you’re risking your tournament life (or a portion of your very valuable chips) with a 50% chance at missing.
In case you’re unsure about investment odds and probabilities, those are not good odds. If the odds are poor, any decent investor would tell you simply not to invest. Wait until an opportunity arises in which you have more favorable odds.
This is sound advice, and is exactly what you should be doing (for the most part) in cash-game Hold’em.
Unfortunately, in a poker tournament, the increasing blind pressure adds other factors into play. These factors force you to flip simply to stay alive in the tournament. You’re forced to play the situation, regardless of the actual hands in play.
To sum up: You don’t want to be taking coin flips, but there will come a point where taking a flip becomes your best chance at staying alive or making it deep.
Make Your Opponents Make the Choice
While you can’t choose not to take coin flips, you can choose when to take them.
In the majority of all coin flip situations, one player moves all-in and the other player calls.
(Note: there are times when both players have a pocket pair, or some other combination of hands that give one player an edge over the other. Since these situations will go both ways (between the pusher and the caller) we’ll exclude those situations from this conversation.)
After removing those situations, the player calling is calling for a 50% shot at taking the pot, but the player pushing actually has a better opportunity at making money.
It’s not possible to put an exact number to it, but the concept is simply known as fold equity.
Just by being the player to have pushed, you have the chance that your opponent will fold. When this happens, you win the pot 100% of the time. If the opponent calls, then you’re a 50% shot.
As you can see, the caller never has any fold equity while the pusher always does.
In other words, you want to be the aggressor, the pusher. If you’re never making any moves, it’s going to be terribly difficult to force your opponent into making a mistake.
Force your opponents to have to choose to flip with you or fold. If you’re always making that choice as the caller, you’re reducing your edge and counting on luck to bail you out.
30% is not 50%
If you’re at the point where your best chance at progressing in the tournament is by taking a coin flip, you need to think in terms of this: 30% is not 50%.
Basically, you need to avoid calling all-in bets with easily dominated hands.
Players will often call with hands such as A♠ 2♠ looking for a flip, knowing this hand is better than even money against K♥ Q♥ or any other non-paired, non-ace hand.
Unfortunately, matching up with any other hand with an ace in it has you at a little less than 30% to win – same as being up against a pair.
So a hand like this is a very poor choice when hoping for a coin flip. First, you have to get lucky to even be in a coin flip before you can have the chance at winning the flip itself.
This goes for hands such as 3♥ 3♦ as well. This is not a bad hand, and is ahead of anything other than a higher pair.
But if you’re up against a higher pair, you’re in a really tight spot. You need to know the range of hands your opponents will be willing to push or call an all-in with before you can choose your own range.
In many tournament situations, pocket threes might be a great candidate for a hand to take a flip with.
But if your opponent has a large stack, and is the kind of player only to raise hands with legitimate strength, you’re putting it all on the line on the hope they have a something like A♥ K♥.
The first step in being successful in tournaments is to make sure that the coin flips you take actually are coin flips. If you get it all in with a dominated hand, you’re simply giving your money away.
Bottom line: You’re going to have to take coin flips in tournament poker; it’s up to you to make sure you take them when it’s best for you.
You know how you look back sometimes and wish you’d paid more attention in school? I’ve been having those moments lately as the conversation has turned toward the Web Economy. Its not that I didn’t like or didn’t pay attention to Mr. Gipson during Ecom class, I just didn’t understand the application to real life. Well, now I know.
The Old (Current) Web Economy
As the Internet has been maturing, our first forays into business online mimicked those of our off-line exploits. Following the rules of the industrial age, it was based on a scarcity mentality… get our products to market first, be the best, horde all the customers and put everyone else out of business. That approach worked really well when, for instance, you were the only car dealership in town. You had a captive audience. It was great!
But now that geography is no longer a limiting factor, the scarcity approach isn’t working as well. You can go to any number of on-line car dealers, find the car you want, with the features you want, at the price you want and have it delivered to your door. Now, instead of having to get a lock on the local market, business owners now have to lock the world market… a slightly more difficult task!
On-line, the Old Economy is characterized by premium content, pay walls and exclusive distribution agreements. These are all on-line attemps to emulate the off-line practice of cornering the local market.
Enter the New Web Economy
The New Economy is driven by abundance rather than scarcity. Its about finding your niche and being the provider of choice for that niche. Continuing the car dealership example, be the world’s leading authority of 1996 Jeep Cherokee Classics. You can’t corner the world market on cars, even Jeeps, probably not even Jeep Cherokees… but 1996 Jeep Cherokee Classics… that’s possible. For everything else, link out to the world’s leading authority in their respective niche, This is the new Link Economy emerging from Web 2.0.
This transition is being brought about by the transition of the web from a destination based experience to an information based experience. It is the reality of the new, post-industrial, decentralized economy… and it is changing everything. Be the best in your field, and link to everything else. If your visitors find value in the links you offer them, they will associate that value with you, and your credibility grows. Hence, you not only want to be a good link target, you want to ensure that the links you give away are high quality links, not just links to any old Jeep dealership.
What the Changing Web Economy Means to You
For the consumer, this is fantastic! Its crowd sourcing (aka Survival of the Fittest) at its best where the best products at the best prices rise to the top. The best resources spring from nowhere (think Wikipedia) and the laggard thinking scarcity thinkers are quickly pushed aside.
This changes search as well. Google knows this and they’re trying to equip us to take advantage of it, albeit weakly. Why google a source of 1996 Jeep Cherokee parts when I can Tweet, “Where can I get parts for my 1996 Jeep Cherokee Classic” and get 10 replies from trusted sources? They are immediately more valuable and reliable that ANYTHING search can return.
For businesses, the case can be a bit more problematic. Surviving in the new link economy means a compete re-think for what we used to call marketing. Now, instead of standing on the box and shouting, “I have the best deals” to a large group, businesses will now have to engage individuals and build credibility as an authority. This also doesn’t bode well for advertising outlets that sell CPM (or cost per thousand).
Staying In Front of the New Web Economy
Over the next few weeks, I’ll continue to explore the changing web economy and what it means. Ways to take advantage of it, maybe even cash in on it. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the RSS Feed to ensure you don’t miss any of the conversation.
You can also get key concept applications and discussion by subscribing to View Source, a weekly newsletter with exclusive, behind the scenes look at how the web works. Subscribe today to ensure you don’t miss another edition!
When you make the final table of a large multi-table tournament, one of the most important decisions facing you may be whether or not you want to make a deal.
With the 2008 WSOP Main Event final table now under way, there is no better time to talk about final-table deal making. As with all other aspects of poker, you rack up long-term profit by making the correct choice when faced with a decision at the table.
Before you can decide whether or not to make or accept a deal, you have to have enough knowledge of deals to make an informed and profitable decision. The first step is understanding the types of deals to be made, and how they work.
Types of Deals
The first type of deal is the chip-chop. This deal is the most common since it’s the easiest to understand, and seems absolutely fair and reasonable to all players involved.
How it works: Each player receives a percentage of the total final-table prize pool equal to the ratio of their chip amount to the total chips in play.
Example: Let’s use the 2008 WSOP Main Event final table for our example.
First, the prize pool:
| Place | Prize Amount |
| 1st | $9,119,517 |
| 2nd | $5,790,024 |
| 3rd | $4,503,352 |
| 4th | $3,763,515 |
| 5th | $3,088,012 |
| 6th | $2,412,510 |
| 7th | $1,769,174 |
| 8th | $1,286,672 |
| 9th | $900,670 |
Total prize pool: $32,633,446
Second, stack sizes:
| Place | Chip Count |
| Dennis Phillips | $26,295,000 |
| Ivan Demidov | $24,400,000 |
| Scott Montgomery | $19,690,000 |
| Peter Eastgate | $18,375,000 |
| Ylon Schwartz | $12,525,000 |
| Darus Suharto | $12,520,000 |
| David “Chino” Rheem | $10,230,000 |
| Craig Marquis | $10,210,000 |
| Kelly Kim | $2,620,000 |
Total chips in play: $136,865,000
Finally, we can calculate the chip-chop amounts. If the final nine were to make a deal before starting play (and if they all hadn’t already received ninth-place money), this is how the numbers would work out:
| Player | Chips | % | Chip-Chop Amount |
| Dennis Phillips | $26,295,000 | 19.21% | $6,269,655.96 |
| Ivan Demidov | $24,400,000 | 17.83% | $5,817,821.08 |
| Scott Montgomery | $19,690,000 | 14.39% | $4,694,790.87 |
| Peter Eastgate | $18,375,000 | 13.43% | $4,381,248.46 |
| Ylon Schwartz | $12,525,000 | 9.15% | $2,986,402.01 |
| Darus Suharto | $12,520,000 | 9.15% | $2,985,209.83 |
| David Rheem | $10,230,000 | 7.47% | $2,439,193.02 |
| Craig Marquis | $10,210,000 | 7.46% | $2,434,424.31 |
| Kelly Kim | $2,620,000 | 1.91% | $624,700.46 |
The Even Spread
The second deal type to mention is the even spread, which really is as simple as it sounds. In fact it’s so simple, no chart is needed to explain it.
Every player receives an even share of the total prize pool. In the case of the 2008 WSOP ME, each of the final nine players would receive $3,625,938.
Haggle ‘n’ Swindle
The final type of deal making I’ll dub the haggle ‘n’ swindle. This is the deal process where anything goes. There are many tournament players who have an amazing aptitude at creating elaborate final-table deals that greatly benefit themselves – and then convincing the other players to accept.
A good salesman can sell anything, regardless of whether the buyer needs or even wants the goods up for sale. I’ve seen players in situations much like Kelly Kim somehow manage to get a share of booty equal to a finishing rank far above reasonable expectation.
For Your Consideration
So how do you know when to make or take a deal, and what type of deal is best for you? Hopefully by now you’ve come to realize that creating your own haggle ‘n’ swindle deal is much more difficult than you might have imagined.
You have to be able to do a large amount of math on the fly while at the same time creating webs of logic to convince or confuse the other players.
Because of this difficulty, more often than not you’re going to be facing the option of one of the first two deal types.
If you look at the charts for the chip-chop, you’ll see that by taking a chip-chop, Kelly Kim would actually lose a minimum of $300k.
When stack sizes are in the extremes, a chip-chop will rarely make logical sense. Even if you flip it, and put eight of the players with a combined amount of chips worth less than 50%, the ninth player holding the majority, a chip-chop is a rotten deal for everyone but the leader.
Before making or accepting a deal, you need to consider the following:
- Your skill level versus the skill of the other players
- Your current mental state
- Your opponents’ current mental state
- Your current financial situation
- The current financial situation of your opponents
- The confidence of your opponents
- Your opponents’ previous final-table success
The more of this information you have, the more profitable a deal you’ll be able to make for yourself. In many situations, a lot of these items will be little more than assumed. Use the information you have (or can collect) to your advantage.
As a rule of thumb, you don’t want to consider making a deal until there are four or fewer players remaining. If you look at the payout structure, the greatest increases in pay happen from fourth to first.
This is where the majority of the total prize money sits, meaning a deal with any more players than that will most commonly cost you more money than it’s worth.
Once you’re down to four or fewer players, you first need to take a very honest, brutal look at yourself. How are you playing right now? How are you feeling? And are you able to maintain your level of play for the duration of the event?
If you don’t have the energy to play your best poker until the finish, you may be better off making a deal to grant you more money than a regular second-place finish would.
If you are not sure you can win, but you are sure you can get more money in a deal than you can make from second place, you should always make that deal.
The same goes for the third-place payout, trying to make it to heads-up. If you are truly exhausted and unable to play quality poker, while your opponents are at the top of their game, getting guaranteed more money than a standard third-place finish is often your best choice.
After you consider yourself, consider your opponents. If your opponents are playing in a tournament above their bankroll, they will be more apt to make a deal than a player looking for the win.
A guaranteed $10,000 looks better to someone with $400 in their account than risking busting next for a $6,000 payday.
Take stock of who your opponents are, where they stand, and what they need. Get the numbers straight, ideally in front of you on paper. You want to actually see the payouts, the stacks and the percentages.
Know your options, and who stands to gain the most. Always figure out what is best for you at that very moment first, and then make the best choice based on what you know about your opponents.
If you take the time to consider all these factors first, chances are you’ll always end up in the good by making a deal.
f you’re not on-line yet, you will be soon. That’s the finding of a recent study commissioned by Prodigy Biz Corp., which found that one-third of U.S. small businesses were on-line. The smallest organizations were the least likely to have taken the plunge. Only one in four companies with fewer than 10 employees reported that it had an Internet presence, while half of those with 10 or more employees were on-line already.
Nearly 75% of small companies reported that cost was not a barrier for getting onto the Web. The survey results ranked reasons for going on-line as follows: promoting to prospects (69%); doing E-commerce (57%); providing better customer service (48%); competing with other businesses (46%); and communicating with employees (11%).
Of course, few small businesses suggested that doing business on the Internet was easy. More than 40% of the small-business owners surveyed claimed that they did not have the staff or the time to maintain a Web site. And 66% didn’t believe that the Web offered them significant growth opportunities, because they are local businesses.
Such quibbling aside, many off-line small businesses planned to get on-line in the near future. Some 40% of businesses that didn’t have Web sites — approximately 2.1 million — said they would be on-line soon. The study was conducted by International Communications Research. –Mike Hofman
Four years ago Jayesh Patel, managing partner of the Los Angeles law firm Parker Mills & Patel, hung his firm’s shingle out on the Web. Although Patel intended to communicate to the firm’s base of big-ticket customers, the overwhelming response to the site has been from prison inmates, who write or call collect in search of a lawyer. “We don’t know what to do about it,” Patel says. “We can’t sort of boldly put on our Web page ‘Prison inmates, please don’t bother us.”
His misconception, he says, was expecting the Web audience to be much like his client base: professionals in management positions with a good income. “The audience is far, far bigger than we would have predicted.” –Emily Barker
“I like banner advertising,” says Vincent J. Schiavone, CEO of 4anything.com, a three-year-old Web business based in Wayne, Pa.
A recent Andersen Consulting study concurs, concluding that experienced U.S. Web users are more likely to buy on-line from a company after exposure to banner ads than they are after exposure to traditional advertising. Schiavone has found that banner ads are actually a great way to promote the thousands of sites that his 100-person company produces.
The CEO reports that he can buy ads on portal sites for as little as $2 per thousand page views. And since companies that sell, for example, lacrosse sticks are willing to pay a decent price to advertise on 4Lacrosse.com, Schiavone can mark up his banner-ad pricing. “The economics work for us on both ends,” he says. –M.H.
Attention, dot-coms: your mountains of venture capital no longer guarantee you special treatment in the ad world. Scheyer/SF Inc., a boutique ad agency in San Francisco that handles accounts like EMusic.com, demands 50% of a campaign’s cost up front. “If the check isn’t in our hands, we do not do the work,” says agency president and founder Dennis Scheyer.
He adds that ad costs are skyrocketing. Demand for airtime is so strong that when companies cancel an ad, TV and radio stations resell that time to another company at a higher rate. He points to one local radio station that a few years ago would have charged $500 for a 60-second spot. Now the price is $5,000.
Analysts jobs are relatively straight-forward: they analyze everything that is taking place in the social web economy and produce reports on them. They can work inside or outside of companies. The companies can be any of the primary companies in the social web economy or they can even work at actual analyst companies (like Forrester Research).
Analysts pay attention to detail and they can also double as a journalist sometimes. Unfortunately for journalists, there are too many stories to write to have anytime to do in depth analysis. Occasionally though journalists overlap with analysts and they end up producing substantive reports. Both journalists and analysts cover their space obsessively.
In my own opinion, the primary distinction between the two is that journalists focus much more of their effort on working their sources and writing articles. The analysts spend a lot more time doing research which can include working the same sources as journalists but for other types of information.
In the social web economy, I would say that one of the most substantial differences in comparison to other industries is how bloggers are accepted as journalists. While they may not always hold the same standard for reporting, blogs have a substantial reach in the technology field. As such web attending any conference that pertains to the social web economy you will see as many bloggers as traditional journalists if not more bloggers.
No matter who they write for, analysts, journalists and bloggers all are important because they help quickly spread information regarding the companies and people in the social web economy. The primary tension for this group is with other analysts and journalists as they compete for valuable information. Additionally, there is occasionally tension between analysts and journalists and their sources as the journalist will push to expose information that the source didn’t initially wish to reveal.
A team can be defined as grouping of individuals keeping in harmony to accomplish a common purpose. Each and every individual within such team is mutually accountable for the performance, approach and meeting of the assigned goal. The progress of any business is largely dependent on the individuals performing as a unit or team. Consequently the concept of an effective at the zenith of any organization has grown immensely popular over the years. The internet has also provided a global platform wherefrom any business organization can think of building an efficient freelance.
Any organization without a guiding or rather a managing body at the back is like a child without parents. The responsibility of any management team is to enforce discipline at the forefront because discipline itself is a virtue. A team not only generates a sense of unity among the individuals but also increases the overall performance with individuals operating as a single unit. From this point of view any organization should focus on at least employing a freelance management team if a full-time seems virtually unaffordable.
In order to build an effective management team it is immensely important to eliminate non-team behavior at the top. Implementing policies and corporate strategies are not the sole aim of any management team. Managers should not decide or exercise personal judgments over the members of the team. On the contrary a team that sets goal based upon the opinions and ideas from the associated members is the best example of its kind. Even a freelance wherein individuals might not be present in-person can prove to be a success on the basis of the team members being accountable for collective results.
A team comprised of members mixed effectively according to their individual skills can bring about maximum benefits for the organization they are working for. The team should be flexible enough to shift the leadership roles among the members according to the situation. Freelance management teams whose members are proficient enough in their particular domain and can simultaneously act as a unit is a great alternative for any organization which is looking for a low cost managerial assistance.
Whatever be the efforts that any management team puts behind to achieve any objective, it can fail until and unless the requirement of the then market condition is properly analyzed and plans are implemented accordingly. Even for a freelance management team it is essential to study the scopes and ascertain the nature of problems that may arise in the course of action. Therefore for the smooth running and for success or failure in broader sense, the role of an effective management team is undeniable.
My latest Project Syndicate piece argues that the world economy has handled the financial shock rather well so far, but that the real test for globalization is yet to come.
History teaches that global economic order is difficult to establish and maintain in the absence of a dominant economic power. The interwar period, which suffered from a similar crisis of leadership, produced not only a collapse of globalization, but a devastating armed conflict on a global scale.
So the stakes in righting the world economy could not be higher. Mismanage the process, and the consequences could be unimaginable.
Unfortunately, many of the solutions on offer are either too timid or demand too much of a global leadership that is in short supply.
The conundrum of global reform is that the proposals that go far enough, such as establishing a global financial regulator, are wildly unrealistic, while those that are realistic, such as reform of the IMF, fall far short of what is needed.
What we need is a vision of globalization that is fully cognizant of its limits. We can start with a simple principle: We should strive not for maximum openness in trade and finance, but for levels of openness that leave ample room for the pursuit of domestic social and economic objectives in rich and poor countries alike. In effect, the best way to save globalization is to not push it too far.
Some startups become huge sensations without requiring any active marketing – YouTube, Skype, and Twitter come to mind. However, the vast majority of successful startups gained adoption through marketing: PR, SEO, partnerships, paid marketing, and so on. My strong suggestion would be to hope for the former but plan for the latter.
Marketing is a huge topic. Here I just want to make the point that, for starters, you need to figure out two things: 1) how information and influence flows in your market, and 2) when and where people use and/or purchase your product.
I’ll use my last startup, SiteAdvisor, as an example. SiteAdvisor (now called McAfee SiteAdvisor) is a consumer security product. Most consumers don’t learn about security products on their own. Instead, they rely on their “family/friend sysadmin” (smartest computer person they know). These family sysadmins read technical websites and magazines. In order to reach this audience, we performed studies on data we had collected, which led to lots of coverage, which raised our profile and bolstered our credibility.
Now to when and where people buy security products. Most people only think about security when 1) they buy a new computer, 2) they first get internet access, or 3) they get a virus or other security problem. The last case is actually pretty rare, so most companies focus on 1 and 2. How do you reach people at those moments? Through “channels” – in particular PC makers (“OEMs”) and internet providers (“ISPs”). (For public market people: focusing on these two channels was McAfee’s big insight in the 2000’s and how they made a comeback versus Symantec who dominates retail).
Most people don’t talk to their friends about security products so it’s very hard to do mass word-of-mouth marketing. (Exceptions would be the beginning of the spyware epidemic around 2001-2 when AdAware got super popular via word of mouth). So you have to understand and pitch to these channels.